I’m running Cryptomator on Windows, and syncing my encrypted drive with OneDrive. Plain old OneDrive will let me restore a deleted file for up to 30 days. How would I accomplish the following tasks when using Cryptomator?
“Restore file with unencrypted name X:\Data\Files\File123.txt” (I know the full path name.)
“Restore the last Quicken backup from March 2021 in folder X:\Backups\Quicken” (I know only a description of the file name.)
These are easy to do with unencrypted file names on OneDrive or similar platform. How could I do these tasks with encrypted file names?
(I’m trying to wrap my mind around Cryptomator’s decision not to allow unencrypted file names and restoring files from backup.)
In short: you can’t.
The restore function is provided by OneDrive. But onedrive does not know anything besides the timestamp about your files or folders. And you dont have information which encrypted files belong to a specific unencrypted file (same for folders)
In long:
If you know exactly when you deleted a file/folder in your vault, you can go to your OneDrive recycle bin, search for that timestamp and restore every file and folder with that timestamp you can find, hoping that this will not mess up your vault structure.
To cover the risk of data loss, you have to set up your own backup. You cannot rely on OneDrive restore function. (or similar function of any other storage provider)
Oddly enough, having 3 copies (without a physical NAS in the corner) is exactly why I’m going to be copying my data to OneDrive. A local copy on my laptop, a copy on cloud.idrive.com, and a copy on OneDrive. I’ll be moving to a tiny apartment, and NAS-in-the-corner would mean giving up something else which could be in that corner. Besides, assuming a 4 year lifetime, cloud NAS is competitively priced with hardware NAS.
In my case, I’m clearly not a primary use case for Cryptomator because I’d like to be able to restore a from the remote.
I wouldn’t say that. I use cryptomator vault for backups as well. And if the vault is ok, obviously it’s a valid source of backup. But it shouldn’t be your only backup, just in case anything is damaging your vault, or deleting your files online.
I would never backup my files to an online storage without cryptomator.
Maybe I have misunderstood your question. I thought you were thinking about restoring single files of encrypted data, for example if you/something accidentally deleted parts of your vault structure. Of course you can access your files in your vault at any time if the vault structure itself is ok.
It just seems to me like, “Oops, I deleted a local file by mistake and I need to restore it from the cloud,” is central to what I need to do. No, I’m not planning on using Cryptomator on OneDrive as my only backup, but if I can’t use my Cryptomator + OneDrive to restore a deleted file, then my other backup becomes my only backup, and that’s not acceptable either.
If I’m going to use OneDrive, it looks like I’ll have to use EncFS, rclone-with-crypt, or Boxcryptor, to encrypt the contents without encrypting the file name. I’m using the cloud as off-site backup, and if a particular combination of products won’t let me restore a deleted file, it just doesn’t meet my need.